Footwear Company Protects Million Square Feet of Rainforest With Square-foot Sandals

An eco-conscious footwear company announced a milestone in efforts to save the rainforest after just one week of online sales. For every purchase of “square foot” sandals, Chipkos is protecting one hundred square feet of land, and already the company has adopted more than one million square feet of Costa Rican tropical forest in Guanacaste.

The goal of the Chipkos “Stand for Square Feet” program is one hundred million sq. feet of rainforest protected, using their non-profit preservation partner, SaveNature.Org.

“Chipkos represents a real and actionable campaign to purchase and protect endangered rain forest land. We are proud to support this first-of-its-kind program combining a product with rain forest adoption,” says Norm Gershenz, Director of SaveNature.org.

The six month-old company today announced a new multi-national Groupon partnership featuring Chipkos Footwear deals on the “ashram-inspired” sandals. The first national Groupon feature of Chipkos ran in twenty-four cities across Canada, and sold out the company’s entire year’s inventory in one week. The latest scheduled Groupon deals are in Australia and the U.S, with several additional to follow in South America and Europe.

Chipkos takes its inspiration from The Chipko Movement, a historic environmental effort which first took place in India in the 17th century. Indigenous villagers protested against the logging of their land by literally attaching themselves to their trees. ‘Chipko’ is a sanskirt word that means ‘to stick’. By ‘sticking’ to their trees, these villagers were, in a sense, the first treehuggers — and the first group environmental effort ever recorded.

The Chipkos Original Sandals are inspired by the classic Indian Osho chappal, which first became popular in the 1960s in the ashram scene of India. The new models are made with low impact, environmentally-friendly materials.

Publicity about the company in TIME magazine, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Glamour, helped propel the popularity of the “square foot” flip-flops.

The eco-friendly footwear is available for men and women in multi-colored hues on the website, www.Chipkos.com . For comfort, the company boasts features like “natural contour moulding, FormCush anatomical arch support and CurvUp foot bed shaping”.

SPECIAL GIFT from the Editor– After sharing this story with the Chipkos company, they offered a special promo code worth 20% off for all readers of the Good News Network! Use the code, GNN20 at www.Chipkos.com. (Expires Nov 25.)